


archeologist's sociology

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, LGBTQ Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 18:11:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1718744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robin and Sanji are alike.</p>
            </blockquote>





	archeologist's sociology

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place prior to Water Seven.

The island is small enough that it’s not on any of their newly-purchased maps, and by Grand Line standards it could be considered sleepy. The docks are busy in the quiet sort of way, ships loading and unloading, a few carts being towed up to the village.

Everything glows golden-red in the setting sun, restful.

Robin watches from the deck while they drop anchor, her coat drawn close around her shoulders. They’re in a temperate zone of the Line but the nights are cold, like coming autumn, enough that all of them sleep with double layers of blankets and want for tea and coffee in the morning, warm beverages a defense against permeating cold.

There’s a yawn from behind, and Robin turns to find Nami stepping up beside her, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a relaxed expression on her face. “I think we can have a quiet night, for once,” she tells Robin. “No marines, no rival pirates in the harbor, and neither Luffy nor Zoro are going ashore.”

“That’s good,” Robin says, and thinks that it’s been too long since she’s set foot on land, seen something other than the pages of her books and the inside of the cabin. “I think I’ll go, for a little while.”

“Take Sanji with you,” Nami advises. “He’s been horribly restless, and getting him away from Zoro’s probably the only way we’re going to have any proper peace. I swear, they’re like neighboring dogs that won’t stop barking across the dividing fence.”

Robin can’t hear the familiar sounds of squabbling now, but she knows that this is true: the cook’s been sulking, shoulders hunched, smoking even more than he always does, hardly leaving the stove save to wander up to the upper deck with his cigarettes and a frown so permanent it could be etched. “I’ll ask him,” she agrees, inclining her head, and Nami gives her a grateful smile.

Sanji agrees to go readily when Robin finds him. His smile is crooked when he gives it, though, not quite genuine around his dim cigarette, fatigue obvious in the sag of his shoulders and the bags beneath his eyes.

“You don’t have to, you know,” Robin admonishes softly when they cast the rope ladder over the side of the _Merry_. “I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“That’s not why I’m going,” he assures her, and steps aside to let her climb down first, rubbing the stub of his cigarette out against the lacquered wooden railing.

She takes his word for it and climbs down to the dock, aware of the shadows growing deeper as the sun sinks ever lower past the horizon.

Sanji’s lighter flares above her, lighting another cigarette already, and then he follows after.

*

They end up in a waterfront tavern, barely more than a hole in the wall. It’s full of sailors all the same, and Robin chooses a table in the corner, so neither of them have to sit with their back to anyone else. Sanji pays for their drinks and sits beside her in silence, leaning on an elbow over his ale with his waistcoat stretched tight across his shoulders.

The two of them look distinctly out of place amidst the crowd, Robin’s certain, but she’s used to that: for all her quiescent nature her appearance still turns heads, because she’s tall and beautiful, harsh features made striking by her self-assurance. Sanji is equally obvious, if only because it’s readily apparent that he’s from the North Blue, golden head bright amidst the darker locals.

Robin scans the crowd, habitual. She glances towards Sanji once she’s finished, and finds his gaze fixed on someone at the bar, expression hooded; smoke trails towards the ceiling from his forgotten cigarette. 

His pale irises are hidden by blown-wide pupils, she realizes, and Robin’s been on the receiving end of looks like that from far too many people to mistake what she sees.

She has never, to her knowledge, received such a look from _Sanji_ , for all his poetic soliloquies and culinary doting.

Robin is an archeologist and a historian, and that makes her a master of putting together whole pictures from smaller fractured pieces. She fills in blanks with a dearth of information, picks out fragments from ancient ruins and draws conclusions from what she’s found, writes full stories from mere glimpses.

So it is that the pieces click into place as she watches Sanji stare at a man at the bar—and it must be a man, for there are no women gathered there.

Robin thinks of his overwrought romanticism towards herself, towards Nami; of how that might balance, in his mind, his many deviations from base masculinity, from his meticulously well-kempt appearance to _this_.

Robin is twenty-eight, twenty of those years spent with a bounty on her head and almost every single one running with rogues on the Grand Line. It took her the better part of that time to come to terms with who she is, with the fact that she is—in the eyes of others only—broken, fundamentally different in this way from most women she’s ever met.

It’s suddenly clear to her that Sanji suffers from everything she did in her youth, and that perhaps he has been too alone to have understood it to not be a flaw or a slight against him.

Beside her he sighs, shoulders slumping low and smoke billowing out of his mouth to curl away into the tavern’s dark interior.

Robin says, “Which one of them is it?”

He jolts like he’s been struck—just a little, suppresses the movement almost as soon as it’s begun, but she catches it anyway, catches a flicker of eyes gone wide with the surprise of being caught looking. “What are you,” he starts, but she cuts him off, smiling a little even though it’s not funny, not really, because there is a bitter sort of amusement at having felt herself equally obvious one time too many.

“The men at the bar,” she says, quietly. Her voice doesn’t carry, and the ambient murmur is more than enough to ensure that their conversation won’t be overheard. “Which one is the one you like?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sanji says, pokerfaced, taking a drag of his cigarette as though everything’s fine, as though Robin can’t see the sudden tension in his form.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she says, “in confidence, because I think you should hear it.”

“What?” and he looks confused, now, brow drawn low, still wary, cigarette held tight between his fingers.

“Another round of drinks, first,” Robin decides.

*

They are two mugs of ale deep—Sanji no longer as tightly wound as a coiled spring—when she starts talking, and what she says is this:

“When I was your age—forgive me for making this sound like a lecture,” Robin breathes out a laugh, is glad to see the edge of his mouth lift in a smile, “I was running with a group of pirates that was one of the first to put me on the path to finding the poneglyphs. We were operating out of a base on an island with a number of big cities, all large enough to have academies and libraries.

“There was a library close to our hideout, and I went there almost every day that I wasn’t away working with the boss. I was looking for texts that would help me find that land’s poneglyph, perhaps give me a hint as to the location of the Rio—but it wasn’t, at the time, what I was interested in the most. What I cared about, what was at the forefront of my mind whenever I went, was the librarian that worked there in the evenings.”

“A handsome guy, was he?” says Sanji, looking down into what’s left of his ale as he says it. He’s drunk at least as much as her, and Robin feels the alcohol warm in her belly, enough to make the words she’s saying more reminiscent than painful.

“It was a woman,” she says, and sees Sanji start even in the darkness, even despite the drink, because of course he catches her meaning, in ways she’s certain few others would. “But she was very beautiful, yes, and more importantly she was very smart, and I fell in love with her mind as much as any other part of her, came to read my books and talk to her every free night I had. I thought she was a treasure as much as the poneglyphs, then.”

Sanji’s clearly visible eye is wide, focused only on her. “You . . .” he trails off, looks suddenly uncertain, almost as guarded as he had before. “What are you saying,” he says, as though there’s any doubt.

“I am saying,” Robin says, “that when I was nineteen I was in love with a woman, and that it is only women that I have been in love with since, ever in my life.”

Sanji blanches, a man caught, and drops his gaze. Robin watches him rub out the stub of his cigarette against a crack in the table, leaving a smear of ashes behind; light a fresh cigarette withdrawn from his back pocket with nervous fingers.

“So,” he says, at last, after a long moment of silence filled only with his inhalation of smoke and the low-level noise drifting from the other patrons of the tavern. “You’re—you’re the same.”

“Or just the opposite, perhaps,” Robin says, smiling in mild amusement and in the hope of putting him back at ease. “Yes.”

“I’ve never—” he looks up at her, flushes suddenly before looking away and taking another intent drag of his cigarette, chin propped on his right palm. “I’ve never met anyone else that was . . .”

Robin’s heart wrenches in sympathy. She knows too well what that is like, hates that he has to know it, hates that what they are is so much of a curse in the world of pirates and the world of men, that something unchangeable about them that makes their respective journeys so much harder. 

She wants to tell him that it’ll be fine, that it’ll be easy, but she knows it isn’t and it won’t be; but there must be some reassurance for him in it, something she can say to make it better, so he doesn’t have to suffer in silence the way she did for years.

Still, she’s not certain what to say, and instead what comes out is, “I take it that means there’s never been anyone,” to fill the silence between them.

To her surprise, this makes Sanji smile, lazy and half-drunk as he drops his head down against one arm. “Not really, no,” he says. “At _Baratie_ . . . there was a boy, once, my own age, that the old geezer hired after one of our cooks got poached by a World Government vessel. 

“He had a gorgeous smile, and I loved seeing him work with his hands. He was a terrible cook,” a laugh, “but I pretended he wasn’t, and that should’ve clued me in, but it took me two months and a dream about kissing him to realize that I _wanted_ to, and then I freaked out and didn’t talk to him for weeks. The old geezer fired him soon after that for botching so many meals, and we didn’t see each other again.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Robin says, and she is. Every story she’s ever heard about people like themselves seems to go like this, circles of self-hatred and unfulfilled dreams, almost no one happy at the end.

Sanji gives a soft laugh, and takes another long, long drag before blowing smoke out across the table. 

“Do you really think,” Robin says, “the Strawhats would hate you so much if they knew? Why the act? Why—”

“You know why,” Sanji says. “Because they’d look at me differently. Because I might . . . because we sleep in the same quarters, and none of them would ever be able to take me being near them again without acting strange, because the swordsman might deck me for so much as coming near him, then.”

“Somehow, I don’t think Zoro cares much for what other people are like,” Robin murmurs, but she does know; she does. There’s a twist that forms in one’s logic after being called monster for so long, a fear that you are one—might become one—that every gaze you cast is somehow wrong.

“Why don’t you tell them about yourself, then?” says Sanji, looking away, blows another stream of smoke over the table surface. 

Robin says nothing, and orders them more drinks.

*

They stumble back to the ship together, Robin steadying Sanji against her side with extra hands in the cover of darkness. He laughs against her shoulder when they nearly knock each other into a ditch running along the inner side of the dock, murmurs thanks when she keeps them upright; and somehow everything’s lighter between them, easier, without his pretenses of _romance._

She’s glad to have the facade gone, leaving just the boy behind, young and lonely and exhausted, all too much like her for all that their lives have been so very different.

“I know,” he slurs when they’re nearly back aboard the _Merry,_ stepping carefully around crates and the ties of moored vessels, “I know love doesn’t matter, not really, not as much as dreams and friends, but—”

“—but sometimes you still wish for it,” finishes Robin, hardly hearing herself even over the low roll of the waves. 

“Yeah,” sighs Sanji, “yeah,” and Robin thinks of poneglyphs and ruins, of the feeling that her soul lies there in all its fragments; but that still, on her darker days, she wishes she had someone at her side.

She thinks of the way she’s seen Sanji sleep, curled in on himself like someone who wishes he had someone else to hold in his arms or someone to hold him, and wonders if she looks the same dozing in the crow’s nest before dawn, empty coffee mug and books sitting all around her.

*

“I’m sorry,” Sanji says, after she pulls them both up the _Merry_ ’s rope ladder, left out for them by Chopper. He has the first watch tonight, held in the crow’s nest so he might watch the stars he loves all the more dearly for having been able to see so few of them from Drum. “I’m sorry for having been—the way I’ve been. Towards you.” 

He gives and awkward half-shrug, and yes, Robin knows.

“You live and learn,” she says. “Though I think they’d all prefer if you did the latter sooner, in this regard.”

Sanji breathes out, rests his forehead once more against her shoulder. “I don’t want to tell them. I don’t think I can.” 

“You don’t have to,” Robin tells him. “You never do. Just be genuine; of all the places we’ve ever been, you and I, this is the one where I don’t think we ever have to hide and fear.”

“Ah, Miss Robin,” says Sanji, and she sees a flash of his smile in the moonlight, the honorific a joke now, not a false endearment. “Haven’t you heard? The only thing the fighting cooks of the sea fear is poor cutlery, and customers knowing where they make their home.”

Robin smiles. “Home is here, now,” she says, and knocks on the side of the mast to let Chopper know they’re back, not wanting to call out.

“So it is,” says Sanji, and looks up along with her when Chopper leans over the edge of the crow’s nest to wave.


End file.
